BY ANDREW LAVALLEE, FASLA

Most landscape architects are familiar with specifications about plant warranties. We often apply them without much thought because many consider it to be an industry standard practice. A typical plant warranty, usually lasting one or two years, requires the contractor to replace plantings that have died or appear to show unsatisfactory growth. Standard specification language often seems reasonable and enforceable. Until it isn’t—especially a few months after you thought the job was complete, or worse, after the end of the stated warranty period when the client calls upset that some of the plants are looking bad or are outright dead. Now comes the hard part. Whose responsibility is it if plants don’t succeed? Aren’t the dead or dying plants supposed to be covered by the warranty? If not, what was the warranty actually supposed to cover? These are all good questions that are symptomatic of a larger problem in the landscape industry. (more…)

BY ZACH MORTICE

Weathermen consists of five snowman figures set on the iced-over Red River. Photo by Jaemee Studio.

There’s something unmistakably structural about a snowman: the tripartite column, the sequential progression of base, torso, and head. It might be every cold-weather kid’s first lesson in engineering and construction. It is also the inspiration for Jaemee Studio’s entry for Winnipeg’s annual Warming Huts design competition.

Weathermen consists of five snowman figures set on the frozen Red River; the largest few are hollow and big enough for a small group of people to huddle inside. They are among several warming huts to be commissioned for Winnipeg’s annual competition, which began in 2009. In addition to others, Weathermen joins Huttie, a “psychedelic funhouse” hut, in offering a whimsical vision of winter recreation in the city’s downtown. (more…)

The things our art director, Chris McGee, hated to leave out of the current issue of LAM.

Image by SWA.

From “The Making of a Memorial” in the February 2019 issue by Timothy A. Schuler, about a memorial by Dan Affleck, ASLA, and Ben Waldo, Associate ASLA, commemorating the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting.

BY MIMI ZEIGER

Tree. Person. Bike. Person. Person. Tree. Anya Domlesky, ASLA, an associate at SWA in Sausalito, California, rattles off how she and the firm’s innovation lab team train a computer to recognize the flora and fauna in an urban plaza.

The effort is part of the firm’s mission to apply emergent technologies to landscape architecture. In pursuing the applied use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, the research and innovation lab XL: Experiments in Landscape and Urbanism follows a small but growing number of researchers and practitioners interested in the ways the enigmatic yet ubiquitous culture of algorithms might be deployed in the field.

Examples of AI and machine learning are all around us, from the voice recognition software in your iPhone to the predictive software that drives recommendations for Netflix binges. While the financial and health care industries have quickly adopted AI, and use in construction and agriculture is steadily growing, conversations within landscape architecture as to how such tools translate to the design, management, and conservation of landscapes are still on the periphery for the field. This marginality may be because despite their everyday use, mainstream understandings of AI are clouded by clichés—think self-actualized computers or anthropomorphic robots. In a recent essay on Medium, Molly Wright Steenson, the author of Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (The MIT Press, 2017), argued that we need new clichés. “Our pop culture visions of AI are not helping us. In fact, they’re hurting us. They’re decades out of date,” she writes. “[W]e keep using the old clichés in order to talk about emerging technologies today. They make it harder for us to understand AI—what it is, what it isn’t, and what impact it will have on our lives.”

The stars were still out when Christie Green, ASLA, parked her Tundra and turned off the engine. We were somewhere near Glorieta Mesa, Game Management Unit 45, about 30 minutes southeast of Santa Fe, New Mexico. In the moonlight, I could make out the bristle-brush tops of ponderosa and piñon pine. I grabbed the camouflage gear Green had lent me and got out of the truck. The April air was just a few degrees above freezing, and the only sounds were the howls of coyotes and the quiet murmurs of cattle somewhere in the valley. As the chill began to seep in, I tugged on my gloves and cowl. I had no idea how long we were going to be out there.

Green, who for the past five years has run a one-woman landscape design practice in Santa Fe called Radicle, had agreed to take me turkey hunting. Almost all of her projects, (more…)